Not tied to a schedule or a stop. These are written wherever the head and heart happen to be at the moment — at anchor, mid-passage, or long before the bow ever points south.
Written in the last quiet days before the lines were untied — on what it means to leave the shore behind.
There comes a morning when the lists are finished, the lines are tied, the last thing that can be packed has found its place. Behind me is the life I knew. A road. A house. A chair that always sat in the same corner. Ahead of me— water. Not a road across it. Not a promise of what waits beyond it. Just water. I have spent enough years being told where the edges are. Where a man should stop. What is practical. What is reasonable. What should be left to younger men. But the horizon has never cared how old I am. It has never asked what I have already done. It simply waits. So I will push away from shore in a small boat carrying exactly what I need and probably more than I should. There will be mornings when the sea lies flat and the sun climbs quietly out of the water. There will be nights when I would give anything for solid ground. There will be wind that arrives like an old friend, and wind that arrives looking for a fight. I will meet them both. Somewhere ahead are islands I have never walked, people whose names I do not know, music I have never heard, meals I have never tasted, and stories that do not belong to me yet. That may be the finest part of leaving: not knowing. I am not sailing away from life. I am sailing directly into it. And when the shoreline finally begins to grow smaller behind me, I don't think I will feel that I am leaving home. I think I will understand something I should have known a long time ago. Home was never the land. Home was never the house. Home was never the place where I kept my things. Home is wherever I am still curious about what lies beyond the horizon. So let the shore disappear. Let the compass settle. Let the sail fill. There is an ocean ahead of me. And I still have somewhere to go.
A line or two of context — where this one came from, what prompted it.
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